The present invention relates to advertising inserts for newspapers, magazines, and the like and, more particularly to such inserts having detachable coupon-bearing flaps.
Advertising supplements, such as of the type often found in Sunday newspapers and commonly known in the trade as free standing inserts, generally consist of an outer folded sheet and one or more single or double folded sheets, loosely retained between the folds of the outer sheets. Typically, each of the sheets of the insert includes advertising material and coupons for mail order purchases or discounts, and the like. To insure economic effectiveness of this type of advertising, it is important that the inserts be inexpensively produced, and that the several sheets of each insert remain together to insure that the advertising material reaches the newspaper or magazine purchaser. It is also important that the coupons included with the advertising material in the insert be readily separable from the sheets on which they are printed, so that minimal effort is required of the reader to make use of the coupons.
Present forms of advertising inserts fall short of achieving these objectives. Modern high-speed presses enable good quality printing to be achieved on relatively inexpensive paper stock but subject the paper web moving through the presses to high tensile forces. If coupons included in such inserts are provided with deeply embedded transverse perforated tear lines to permit ready separation by the consumer, the web would not withstand the tensions to which it is subjected in the printing process and would tear. Moreover, known perforation systems, which are designed to punch lines of small round holes in the paper, cannot operate effectively in the high speed production environment described. Often, the holes are imperfectly punched, leading to mutilation of the coupons, rather than a clean tear. Perhaps more importantly, the punching process produces a substantial quantity of tiny paper bits (sometimes referred to as "chad"), that must be continuously removed from the production site, a difficult task in modern, high speed printing and assembly systems. To avoid this problem, perforation lines for such coupons are seldom used in free standing inserts and the consumer is left to the use of scissors or tearing to remove the coupons.
Similarly, the problem of securing the several sheets of the insert together cannot be solved by stapling or other known fastening techniques, because they are economically infeasible.
One form of insert which reflects the shortcomings of known inserts is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,520,560 to Isaac. The insert of the patent is stapled into a magazine, and includes a plurality of coupons formed along one edge of one side of the folded insert sheet. These coupons are attached to the edge of the advertising sheet by a perforated line, but in the direction perpendicular to the perforated line are, in one embodiment, entirely separated from each other, and in another embodiment separated from each other over all of their lengths except for a minimal portion at the outer edges. Because of the transverse perforated lines separating the coupons from the rest of the sheet, the insert of the Isaac patent is not adaptable to production by modern, high-speed and economical methods, as described above.